Search Your Saved Content

Import your browser bookmarks, saved articles, and project references into Hister, and you can search them alongside your browsing history. Add a few query aliases, and those collections become easy to reach: !bm deadlock for your bookmarks, !docs timeout for reference material, !notes migration for your own notes.

Since the earlier post about import commands, we have added browser bookmark imports, Raindrop.io, Readeck, sitemap imports, and continuous file imports. Here are some ways to put them to use.

The examples below send documents to your configured Hister server. If you have not set one up yet, start with the quickstart guide.

Import Your Bookmarks

To import them, run:

hister import browser bookmarks

Hister detects supported bookmark stores on your machine and lets you choose which to import. Firefox and Chromium families are supported, including browsers such as Zen, Brave, and Vivaldi, as well as Ladybird. You can also select a browser explicitly:

hister import browser bookmarks --browser firefox

Use --db PATH to select a particular profile’s bookmark store. This is useful when you keep work and personal browsing in separate profiles. Add a different --label to each import if you want to search them separately later.

Imported pages receive the bookmarks label by default. You can search their contents immediately:

label:bookmarks deadlock

For repeated searches, open Rules, find Search aliases, and add !bm in Keyword with label:bookmarks in Expands to. Now !bm deadlock runs the query above. The ! prefix keeps the shortcut distinct from ordinary words you might search for.

Add a Site Through Its Sitemap

To add a documentation site or blog archive, point Hister at its sitemap and give the collection a label:

hister import sitemap https://docs.example.com/sitemap.xml --label reference

Sitemap indexes and gzip compressed files are supported. The import stays within the listed URLs, so links to other sites do not expand the crawl.

Create an alias !docs that expands to label:reference, then use queries such as !docs timeout. You can reuse the same label for several documentation sites to search your reference collection with one shortcut.

Existing documents are skipped by default. Add --force when you want to fetch fresh copies. Bookmark and sitemap page imports both use persistent crawl jobs. To inspect failures or resume an interrupted job, use the ID printed by the import:

hister crawl errors JOB_ID
hister index --job-id JOB_ID

Resume from the same local configuration that created the job. For sitemaps, discovery must finish before the resumable page job is created. Supply any crawler or ownership overrides again when resuming.

Sitemap imports were added after v0.20.0. At the time of writing, this example requires a rolling build or a build from source.

Bring Your Reading Lists

Raindrop.io and Readeck have joined the existing import sources: Linkding, Linkwarden, Karakeep, Shaarli, and wallabag. You can keep using these tools to organize your reading while making their content searchable through Hister.

For Raindrop, a CSV export is a simple starting point:

hister import raindrop --input Raindrop.io-Export.csv

You can also import directly from your account with a Raindrop API token:

export HISTER_IMPORT_RAINDROP_TOKEN='your-raindrop-token'
hister import raindrop

The API import preserves notes, highlights and their annotations, tags, and collection paths, and downloads the linked pages. Notes and highlights become searchable alongside the page text, so you can search for your own annotations as well as the author’s words.

If a linked page is no longer available, Hister still imports the Raindrop bookmark details and reports the download failure.

When repeating a Raindrop import, add --skip-existing to avoid downloading pages already in Hister. Leave it off when you want to refresh existing content or changed bookmark details.

Readeck imports use the article content already saved in your instance:

export HISTER_IMPORT_READECK_TOKEN='your-readeck-token'
hister import readeck https://readeck.example.com

This can bring an older article into Hister even when the original website no longer serves it. If Readeck has no usable saved content, Hister tries the original URL. Repeating the import picks up new and updated bookmarks through Readeck’s sync API.

To search both services with one shortcut, create !read with this expansion:

metadata.source:(raindrop|readeck)

Then !read deadlock searches both collections. Service imports retain their source in metadata, so this alias still works if you change their labels to group them by project. Add other imported services to the alternatives as needed, for example metadata.source:(raindrop|readeck|wallabag).

The source service tokens in these examples are separate from the token used to connect to Hister. The import documentation covers credentials and options for each service. Imports leave the source collections in place, and deleting an item from a service does not automatically delete its Hister copy.

Keep Your Notes Searchable

If Hister runs on another machine, run the import on the computer that holds your files:

hister import file --watch --source laptop --label notes ~/notes

Hister extracts the content locally and sends searchable snapshots to the server. With --watch, the command performs an initial scan and keeps importing new and changed files until you stop it. Removing a source file leaves its previously imported snapshot in Hister.

Keep --source laptop stable between runs so updates replace earlier snapshots, and use a different source name for each machine. Set up !notes to expand to label:notes for searches such as !notes migration.

When the server can already access your files, use local directory indexing to have it scan and watch them directly.

Create Shortcuts for Projects

An alias can combine several filters. Suppose you want a shortcut for GitHub pages among your imported bookmarks. Add !code with this expansion:

label:bookmarks domain:github.com

Searching !code retry now limits results to bookmarked GitHub pages containing retry. Use the same pattern for a documentation host or an internal wiki you return to often.

For a project with references spread across sources, choose a project label when importing. For example, these commands put a site’s documentation and a local notes directory under atlas:

hister import sitemap https://docs.example.com/sitemap.xml --label atlas
hister import file --watch --source laptop --label atlas ~/projects/atlas/notes

Add !atlas with the expansion label:atlas. Now !atlas deployment searches both sources. The label replaces each import’s default label, so use it when project scope is more useful than the source grouping.

Choose shortcuts for the searches you repeat. A few collection aliases and one or two project aliases are enough to make imports part of your daily workflow. The alias documentation and query reference cover more combinations.